In 1957, the summer before I started
my last year of high school, I wrote a fan letter to Robert
Heinlein.
He was my favorite science fiction writer, and I wanted to tell him
so.
I said that his stories seemed like steak next to everybody else's
hamburger.
Even though I had said that he
needn't bother
to answer, Heinlein replied with a postcard. He said that my
letter
was a pleasure to answer. It was a thrill for me to hear from
him.
The following year, I lined up
a summer job
with the Forest Service in Oregon. I wrote to Heinlein in the
spring
saying that I would be traveling west, and I asked whether it would be
possible to stop and meet him.
This time, however, I didn't
get an answer
-- which I took for an answer.

What delighted
me about Heinlein was the individuality
of his voice. Nobody else sounded quite like him.
I liked the confidence with
which he wrote,
his breadth of knowledge, his clever turns of phrase, and the way he
had
of slipping necessary information into his stories sideways.
Beyond that, Heinlein offered
me a special
education in the relativity, arbitrariness and transience of common
social
practices we ordinarily take for granted as solid, real and
enduring.
As Heinlein put it in a talk in 1941: "Any custom, technique,
institution,
belief or social structure that we see around us today will change,
will
pass, and most of them we will see change and
pass."
When the narrator of a
Heinlein juvenile newly
returned from the stars is shocked by social change and recalls his
father's
disapproval if one of his sisters came to the dinner table without a
hat
on her head -- "head bare-naked, like an animal" -- that made an
impression
on me. In the conformist Fifties, it was a useful thing for a
youngster
to know that things do change and could easily be different than they
were.
And were going to be
different, too.
Above all, however, what I
valued most in
Heinlein was a handful of stories that first frightened me, then
intrigued
me, and ultimately challenged me.
There was Beyond
This Horizon ,
which asked in so many words: "What is the meaning of
life?"
There was "Waldo", which said
that the world
is constructed out of our beliefs, and alters as our beliefs
alter.
There was "Universe", which
said that the
human situation is not what we think, that we've forgotten our
purposes,
and that we need to be shown where we are and where we're
going.
And there were the other
unsettling early
Heinlein stories -- "They", "By His Bootstraps", and "The Unpleasant
Profession
of Jonathan Hoag". In these stories, it wasn't just social
convention
that was called into question. It was the very fabric of
assumed
reality.
That gave me something to
think about.

I loved
science fiction.
I wanted to understand what it really was beyond what it was said to
be.
And I wanted to write it myself.
To do either one of these
meant that I had
to study Heinlein closely, and also find my distance from
him.
It took me awhile to do
that.

The first paper
I was asked to write during
my freshman year at the University of Michigan was for an introductory
psychology course. The teacher told us to do some
investigation and
compare the representation of a piece of psychological research in the
popular press with what psychologists themselves had to say about
it.
I saw this as an
opportunity. In several
of his stories, Robert Heinlein had cited a man named Samuel Renshaw as
the source of techniques for training vastly improved accuracy of
perception.
I could find out for myself what was fact and what was
invention.
I received an A for the paper
I wrote, and
I sent a copy of it to Heinlein. This time he answered me
with a
three-page single-spaced letter.
That was a long time ago, and
I no longer
have the letter. The one thing that I do remember from it now
is
Heinlein saying that when he was working on a manuscript he was able to
remember it so well that he could lie awake at night and mentally make
changes in punctuation. But when he was done with a story, he
could
forget it so completely that he could read it at a later time for
pleasure.
In 1966, when I was writing
regularly for
fanzines, I put this paper through the typewriter, and then passed it
on
to British fan Pete Weston. He published it as the October
1966 issue
of his apazine Nexus .